Two questions are raised under this heading—the question whether, as was argued by F. C. Baur, the “Simon Magus” of the “Clementine Recognitions” and “Homilies” is a mask-name for a polemic directed primarily at the Apostle Paul; and the more fundamental question whether the Simon Magus of the Acts is or is not a historical character.
The reasons for holding Simon to be a mythical personage (as apart from the reasons for supposing the Clementine Simon to be meant for Paul, and the story of the Acts to be a misconceiving adaptation of the Clementine narrative) are overwhelming. To begin with, Justin Martyr, a Samaritan born, expressly says[1] that almost all the Samaritans worshipped Simon.[2] This alone might dispose of the notion that the “Simonians” dated merely from the time of Paul and Peter. It is absurd to suppose that nearly all the Samaritans, a people with old cults, could be converted within a century to a new Deity originating in one man. The cult must date further back than that. And that Justin, though of Samaritan birth, could widely misconceive the cults around him, is pretty clear from his famous blunder of finding his Simon Magus as Simo Sanctus in the Semo Sancus of Rome, the old Sabine counterpart of the Eastern Semo.[3]
For there is abundant evidence, to begin with, that a name of which the basis is Sem is one of the oldest of Semitic God-names. We have the forms Shem, Sime-on, Sams-on, S(h)amas (the Babylonian name of the sun; Hebrew Shemesh), San-d-on, or Samdan[4] Semēn and Sem, all plainly connected with a sun-myth. Shamas or Samas was an Assyrian Sun-God, the duplicate of Melkarth and Hercules. Samson or Simson or Shimshai (= the Sun-man), the Hebrew Sun-hero, is unquestionably a mere variant of that myth. Sand-on, also a Sun-God, is the same myth over again. Baal-Samēn, “the Lord of Heaven,”[5] is the same conception as Baal-Melkarth; Baal, “the Lord,” a Sun-God himself as well as Supreme God, being joined with the Sun-God proper. The name Sem, again, is found as signifying Hercules, in conjunction with those of Harpocrates and the Egyptian Hermes,[6] and is probably involved in the mythical queen-name Semiramis (Sammuramat), since she in one of the myths gets her name from Simmas, “keeper of the king’s flocks,” who rears her[7]—another form of the Sun-God, belike. Simeon, in the myth of the twelve tribes, is one of the twin-brethren, who in all mythologies are at bottom solar deities. The “on” means “great,” as in Samson, Dagon, Solomon, etc.;[8] and the Dioscuri of the Greek and Roman myth were “the Great Twin Brethren.” It was added to the name of the Samaritan God Êl Êlyon, “Great Êl,”[9] who is just the Êl (singular of Elohim) of the Hebrews. But the name Shem itself means “the Lofty”;[10] and the name of the mythical ancestor of the Shemites is at bottom a God-name, just as are those of Noach, Abram, Jacob, and Isra-ēl. It may also, it appears, have had the significance of “red-shining.”[11] And, last but not least, the same vocable also has the significance of “name,” so that the Semites or sons of S(h)em were also “the men with names”[12]; and the Hebrew “Shem hemmaphorash” or Tetragrammaton was the name of four letters (IEUE = Yahweh) or “the peculiar name.”[13] Lenormant declares[14] that this last tenet came from Chaldea, where “they considered the divine name, the Shem, as endowed with properties so special and individual that they succeeded in making of it a distinct person.” But this idea of the sacredness of the God-name was one of the most prevalent of ancient religious notions. It was still devoutly held by the Christian Origen, who argued[15] that the Hebrew divine names must be held to because they alone were potent to conjure with. It appears in the Judaic Teaching of the Twelve Apostles in its Christianised form (c. x), in the passage of thanksgiving beginning, “We thank thee, holy Father, for thy holy name, which thou hast made to dwell in our hearts.” In the Jewish Sepher Toledoth Jeschu, Jesus is made to do his magic works by virtue of the “Shem hemmaphorash,” the Tetragrammaton, of which he has furtively possessed himself. Thus could an ancient God-name retain its mysterious prestige even after the mystery-mongers (reversing the process imagined by Lenormant) had taken the name-quality out of it, and left only the word for “name.” In other ways it clung to the Jewish cult. It is highly probable that the pre-eminent Jewish prayer, the “Shema” (or the “Shemoneh Esreh”), of which the name is explained away into insignificance, is an extremely ancient prayer to the Sun-God.[16] Even this is sought to be connected with a historical “Simon.”[17] And all the while the original God Sem survives in the Jewish mythology as “Shamma-ēl,” the Prince of Demons and angel of death, who has power over all peoples except the Jews;[18] and at the same time in the legend of Samu-el, the unshorn, the child of the heretofore sterile mother (vexed by her rival as Rachel by Leah), the potentate who makes and unmakes kings, and who is called up as a “God”[19] from the earth by incantation.
But all this connects decisively with Samaria. It is not improbable that the name Samaria itself was derived from the name of the Sun-God, it being very much more likely that the mountain would be named from the God who was worshipped on it than from a man Shemer.[20] The last is obviously a worthless gloss. A reasonable alternative view is that as the God-name Asshur is identified with the name of the Assyrian country and people, whether giving or following their race-name, so the Semitic God-name Shem is bound up with the name Samaria, as that of Athênê with Athens. It is at all events clear that, as is claimed by Volkmar,[21] Sem or Simon was the chief God of the Samaritans. They declared to Antiochus, according to Josephus,[22] that their temple on Mount Gerizim had no name, but was that of “the greatest God”; and this squares with the other evidence, whether or not it be true that they offered, as Josephus states, to dedicate the temple to Zeus of the Hellenes. For, S(h)em being “the high,” Sem-on would be the Great High One or Greatest God, just as Êl Êlyon was the great Êl, the Great Power, Greatest of Powers. And as Sem-on was also the Great Name, the God was in that sense without a name, which circumstance is the explanation of the otherwise pointless phrase of the Johannine Jesus ([John iv, 22]) to the Samaritan woman, “Ye worship that which ye know not what.” And all the ideas converge in the phrases in the Acts ([viii, 9–10]), that Simon claimed to be “some great one” (ἑαυτὸν μέγαν) and was spoken of as “that power of God which is called Great.” In fine, Simon Magus, the Mage, is just a version of Simon Megas, Great Simon.
We know from their version of the Pentateuch that the later Samaritans, being strong “monotheists” in one of the senses of that elastic and misleading term, sought always to substitute angels for Elohim in the old narratives of divine action (e. g. [Gen. iii, 5]; [v, 1]; [v, 24]; [xvii, 22]), “lest a corporeal existence should be attributed to the Deity.”[23] And it is instructive to note how their theological drift exhibits itself in early Christism. The doctrine of the “Logos” is not merely Alexandrian-Christian, it is Judaic. Some of the Aramaic paraphrasts of the Old Testament at times wrote “the Word of Jehovah” instead of the angel of Jehovah, sometimes the “She-kin-ah,” which means “the abode of the Word of Jehovah.”[24] On the other hand, we know from the Gospel of Peter that one of the early Christian sects regarded Jesus as having received his dynamis, his power, at baptism, and yielded it up at crucifixion. Here we are close to Samaritanism, in which the angels were regarded[25] as “uncreated influences proceeding from God (dynameis, powers),” pretty much as Simon is described in the Acts. Thus “Simon” for the Samaritans would just be “Êl,” which the Samaritan Justin, like the writer of “Peter,” held to mean “Power.” And at the same time, be it observed, Simon was “the Word.”
But still the proof abounds. In Lucian’s account of the Syrian Goddess we are told[26] that in the temple at Byblos there was a statue, apparently epicene or double-sexed, called by some Dionysos, by others Deucalion, and by others Semiramis, but to which the Syrians gave no specific name, calling it only Semeion, a word which in Greek properly means “sign,” but may mean image. There can be little doubt that Movers[27] was right in surmising this statue to be just the primordial Sem or Sem-on, the Great Sem of the Semitic race. The two-sexed character is in perfect keeping with the ideal duality of the old Assyrian Nature-Gods;[28] and the peculiar detail of the name which was not a name brings us again to the Sem-on of the Samaritans.
Everything in the Christian legend falls in with this identification. The Fathers[29] tell us of one Helen, a prostitute from Tyre, with whom Simon went about, and whom he gave out to be a reincarnation of Helen of Troy, and also his “Thought.” Helen is almost unquestionably, as Baur[30] surmised, the Selene or Luna of the old sun-cultus. In the paragraph following his account of the Semeion, Lucian tells us that in the forepart of the same temple stands the throne of Helios, but without a statue; Helios and Selene, the sun and moon, being the only divinities not sculptured in the temple—though he goes on to mention that behind the throne is a statue of a clothed and bearded Apollo, quite different from the Greek form. Here, again, we have a mystic conception of the Sun-God, a conception necessarily confusing to ordinary visitors, even supposing the priests themselves to have had any consistent ideas about it; and the fact[31] that the temple further contained among other statues one of Helena (herself an old Moon-Goddess), gave ample opportunity for the usual mythological variants. Thus it came about that while Justin and Irenæus connect Simon Magus with Helen, Irenæus says the Simonians have “an image of Simon in the likeness of Jupiter, and of Helen in that of Minerva”—a curious statement, which at once recalls that of Lucian[32] that the Hêrê of the temple of Byblos “has something of Athênê and Aphrodite, of Selene and Rhea, of Artemis, of Nemesis, and of the Parcæ.” This again squares with the fact that in the Chaldeo-Babylonian system Samas was associated with the goddess Gula, “triform as personating the moon, and sometimes replaced by a group of three spouses of equal rank, Malkit, Gula, and Anunit.”[33] And in the Latin translation by Rufinus of the pseudo-Clementine “Recognitions,” for Helena we actually have Luna.
The chain is complete. We are dealing not with a historic person or persons, but with an ancient cult, which Christian ignorance and Judaic “monotheism” between them strove to reduce somehow to a historical narrative, as the myths of Abraham and Samson and Israel and Elijah and a dozen others had been reduced, as the mythic ritual had been in the gospels, and as indeed the rituals of Paganism had been in the current pagan mythologies. There was no Samaritan Simon the Mage, who met a Christian Peter; it was not a preaching Simon who taught of himself, but the Samaritan populace who traditionally believed of their God Sem or Simon, that “he appeared among the Jews as the Son, while in Samaria he descended as the Father, and in the rest of the nations he came as the Holy Spirit.”[34] The parallel holds down to the last jot. The Semeion of the temple of Byblos had a dove on his head,[35] and there are abundant Jewish charges as to the worship of a dove by the Samaritans at Mount Gerizim;[36] so that Simon was the Logos receiving the Holy Spirit, the dynamis, just as Jesus did in the Gospels; and the Christists’ doctrine that the Holy Spirit should be given to the nations is simply an adaptation of the Samaritan syncretism, which they sought to override by a syncretism of their own in their latest gospel, where it comes out that their Galilean Jesus was called a Samaritan by Jews,[37] a charge which curiously enough he does not dispute, denying only that he has “a daimon.” This is exactly the myth of Simon turned into a story of an incarnate Messiah, who affirms his reality.[38] Well might the Fathers call their imaginary “Simon” the Father of all heresies. He was the “Father” in a sense of their own creed, as well as of all the Gnosticisms into which it broke.